Danish police said Saturday they had stopped an attempt to attack the cartoonist whose 2005 caricatures of Prophet Muhammad had outraged the Muslim world, local media reported.

A 28-year-old Somali man was armed with an axe and a knife when he entered the cartoonist Kurt Westergaard's home in Aarhus on Friday, police said.

The Danish Security and Intelligence Service said in a statement the attack was terror-related, adding that the attacker had close ties with the Somali terrorist group al-Shabab as well as al-Qaeda leaders in east Africa.

The man was shot by the police but his life was not in danger, the police added.